The dialogue needs to fly, light and airy and fast, in Noel Coward's "Design for Living." The characters should bat it around like a badminton birdie.

But in the new production on Berkshire Theatre Group's Unicorn Stage, the sport that comes to mind is football. The action is long, the volume loud, the emotions weighty and, except for an expertly played drunk scene that has just the right tone for the material, the characters crash into one another like linebackers.

The production, marking the BTG directorial debut for longtime company actor Tom Story, feels more like melodrama, like a hyper-articulate soap opera, than a roundelay of wicked wisecracks and witty ripostes.

The play — written in 1932 and originally starring Coward with his friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne — is about a trio of libertines: playwright Leo (Tom Pecinka), painter Otto (Christopher Geary) and designer Gilda (Ariana Venturi). Mutually besotted and believing an artistic temperament frees them, or ought to, from societal expectations as well as conventional romantic and sexual behavior, the three pair up in different arrangements over five years in Paris, London and New York.

When the play starts, Gilda is living with Otto but ends up in bed with their old friend Leo. In the second act, Gilda and Leo are living together, but she reconnects with Otto, then decides to leave them both and marry their (slightly) more conventional art-dealer friend, Ernest (Paul Cooper). In the third act, Gilda realizes she cannot be apart from either Leo or Otto.

The BTG production feels incompletely conceived and out of sorts on several levels. The sexual aspect, which in Coward's time surely was presented with a wink-nudge, aren't-we-naughty variety of merriment, is slightly more direct here: After Gilda leaves them, Otto and Leo kiss, and not merely in an affectionate, European-greeting way. (The script, which says nothing about the men being sexually involved, merely calls for the to embrace at that moment.) But given how flamboyantly gay Otto and Leo seem in this production — they're not just thin, neat, well spoken and handsomely attired — it's coy for Story to wait until the end of the second act to make explicit what's been obvious since the beginning.

The histrionics and intensity of some of the arguments make it unclear how Story intends audiences to respond to the characters. The production alternately has the froth of expert badinage and the emotional betrayals of "General Hospital," which makes for an uncomfortable fit. Though the actors are young — all three principals are graduate students in the Yale School of Drama and were in BTG's "The Cat and the Canary" last summer — their age actually helps in this production: People in their 30s or 40s behaving like this would seem ridiculous. And there's nothing wrong with any of the performances. They simply haven't been well served by their director.